After the Genome: A Language for Our Biotechnological Future

3. The “Warfare” of Science and Religion and Science’s Ethical Profile

55 Thomas M. Lessl the “wArfAre” of science And reliGion And science’s ethicAl profile 3 As science grows so also does its public responsibility, but some habits of communication that foster its advancement also diminish its ability to rise to this challenge—of addressing the ethical pressures that science and technology bring upon our world. My aim is to put this problem in historical perspective. i mean to argue two points: first, that scientists often manifest communication habits that promulgate ethical confusion, and, second, that these patterns are rooted in science’s institutional history. By “ethical confusion” i mean something specific: a contradictory tendency to invoke something like programmatic agnosticism, now more often called “methodological naturalism,” an official repudiation of the notion that scientific knowledge supports moral meanings or any other kind of meaning beyond the ken of materialistic causality, while also advancing (albeit more subtly) the opposite notion that the growth of knowledge and moral betterment are the same thing. i tie this pattern of equivocation to science’s institutional history because it is a rhetorical habit that was made attractive by the specific pressures scientists confronted as they struggled to gain professional standing in the nineteenth century. With science’s successful institutionalization in that period, this pattern gained an informal sanction and a momentum that has sustained it ever since. it is not my intention to suggest that science should have no place in public life—a separation of science and state. Science could succeed only by acting in this arena, and countless matters of public interest depend upon its wise councils. But moral reason is the fabric of public life, and the manner by which science arose as a great institutional power has forced it into a 56 g After the Genome contradictory posture. The pressures that came into place in this nineteenthcentury period also encouraged scientists to represent their achievements as products of a dispassionate objectivity and to simultaneously represent that same knowledge as the moral leaven of modern Progress. Ever since, science has drawn much of its public prestige from its perceived objectivity, something tied up with the claim that it deals only with matters of fact, with “is” but not “ought.” it is the fact that it is impossible to sustain this division where science bears upon public life that introduces the problem. So long as our scientific culture adheres to this position of ethical agnosticism while also wishing to present itself heroically (and thus as a moral actor of great import), it will sustain such equivocation. i describe this aspect of the scientific self-conception as “heroic” because it is promulgated in a kind of narrative romance, legends of warfare between religion and science that demonstrate those special virtues of the latter that the former lacks. Superficially these stories might seem to do the opposite, to uphold an is/ought divide that illustrates science’s inflexible neutrality on matters of right and wrong. They do so, typically, by relating episodes that illustrate how the “cherished beliefs” of religious people made them resistant to the strictly fact-based inquiries of science. Whereas religion’s preoccupation with “ought,” by such accounts, necessarily distorts its judgments , science gains its special clarity from its rigorous devotion to understanding what “is.” However, upon closer inspection we will see that the same narratives advanced in support of this is/ought distinction equivocate by also collapsing the “is” of scientific objectivity with the “ought” of a historical vision grounded in the notion of Progress. This pattern can be detected in a recent sociology text that invokes the warfare narrative in setting out two reasons why science “is a very powerful method of explaining the world.” its authors illustrate the first of these reasons, that “truth can be separated from fallacy (fiction),” in the following fashion. A classic example is the religious suppression of Galileo’s argument that the Earth revolved around the Sun (and not the other way around, as the Catholic Church hierarchy believed). For a time this idea was successfully suppressed, but its demonstrable truth was simply too powerful to deny. Under modernity, therefore, objective truths replace subjective faiths as the primary form of explanation.1 By asking readers to suppose that Galileo’s conflict with the church speaks to the central concerns of the debate over Copernican science, these authors the “wArfAre” of science And reliGion f 57 fundamentally misrepresent not only this episode...